The British Association for Behavioural & Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP) encourages the formation of Special Interest Groups (SIG's) in areas that members want to particularly focus on. There has been discussion recently about a possible SIG on Compassion. If you're a member of the BABCP and you would like to be involved, do please let me know (if you haven't done so already). I've made some suggestions about the kind of territory a Compassion SIG might cover (see below), but I very much understand that people who are interested in the SIG, may well not be interested in all the areas I've suggested ... and they may have additional suggestions to add. The aim would be discuss all this further once we see if there at least 15 of us who would like to support the SIG's establishment.

May's edition of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology contains three articles on trust that got me thinking a bit. It's been said that the qualities that attract you to a potential partner (or friend) may well end up being the very issues that become most problematic in the relationship. So, for example, one's partner's ability to be spontaneous, emotional, let their hair down & have a great time may later become a real issue over their drinking, extra-marital affairs, and irresponsibility with money. Or from the other end of the personality spectrum, their reliability and conscientiousness may become a real strain because they later seem over-cautious and kill-joys. Anyway here's three additional contributions to this debate: